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Form to DB

formtodb.com

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Re: Form to DB

#81

Post by throwaway60320 »

_heimdall wrote: post #80
throwaway60320 wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not simple. I made multi-page forms with dozens fields where your suggestion would lead to intangible mess of spaghetti code - I know because I worked with the web way before React. Even with the best coding standards and a team of seniors it's just too hard to maintain - and seniors usually don't write forms. I really don't want to go back to the jQuery days. You do you, but don't say it's easier - it really is…

Oh that's interesting, multi-page forms are actually my least favorite form use case for react. I reach for a state machine whenever possible to manage the complex flow of the multi-page or multi-step form, even if react is still used for custom inputs.

Check out XState, it's really great!

But it's not that necessary in my case, my forms are usually not complex statecharts, just a lot of individual and largely decoupled complex form controls - multiselects with rules, map pins, tag inputs with autosuggest, data grids etc.

Re: Form to DB

#82

Post by recursivedoubts »

throwaway60320 wrote: post #76
rmbyrro wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Doing validation in the frontend is a bad idea. You'll have to do in the server, if you're sane. I bet Retool Forms does in the server. You're worried the page will refresh with an empty form, if it fails. It's simple, just collect the data and return the form pre-filled using the value attribute, along with the error message. If you don't want to refresh the page, you could even use something like htmx, which is a L…

Of course you have to validate on the server. That's a given, always. But you want to provide better UX to the user. Htmx is not simpler than React. I can't deploy that without a server that knows everything about the frontend. React allows me to decouple. Templates are hell. I lived in it for many years, never again.

sometimes it is:

https://htmx.org/essays/a-real-world-react-to-htmx-port/

Re: Form to DB

#83

Post by slowhand09 »

Ladies and gentlemen of the Hacker News jury, I’m just a caveman. I fell on some ice and later got thawed out by some of your scientists. Your world frightens and confuses me! Sometimes the honking horns of your traffic make me want to get out of my BMW.. and runoff into the hills, or wherever.. Sometimes when I get a message on my mobile phone, I wonder: “Did little demons get inside and type it?” I don’t know!My primitive mind can’t grasp these concepts. But there is one thing I do know – when we get a "new" solution that replaces all the former solutions, and uses React or HTML, IT MUST BE MAGIC!

Re: Form to DB

#84

Post by sodapopcan »

throwaway60320 wrote: post #76
rmbyrro wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Doing validation in the frontend is a bad idea. You'll have to do in the server, if you're sane. I bet Retool Forms does in the server. You're worried the page will refresh with an empty form, if it fails. It's simple, just collect the data and return the form pre-filled using the value attribute, along with the error message. If you don't want to refresh the page, you could even use something like htmx, which is a L…

Of course you have to validate on the server. That's a given, always. But you want to provide better UX to the user. Htmx is not simpler than React. I can't deploy that without a server that knows everything about the frontend. React allows me to decouple. Templates are hell. I lived in it for many years, never again.

Detractors of the "html over the wire" movement are always talking about it as if the people working on this stuff didn't live through the jQuery days and are blindly repeating them.

Re: Form to DB

#85

Post by throwaway60320 »

recursivedoubts wrote: post #82
throwaway60320 wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Of course you have to validate on the server. That's a given, always. But you want to provide better UX to the user. Htmx is not simpler than React. I can't deploy that without a server that knows everything about the frontend. React allows me to decouple. Templates are hell. I lived in it for many years, never again.

sometimes it is: https://htmx.org/essays/a-real-world-react-to-htmx-port/

Yeah until a manager comes and says "well great, it works, now let's do a mobile app like that"

Re: Form to DB

#86

Post by nextworddev »

kinj28 wrote: post #19
nextworddev wrote: post #14

As a side note I found retool to be the most prohibitively expensive out of 6-7 solutions I was researching for “low code admin app builder” ecosystem.

Curious - what was your use case for low code tool? Just build a single admin tool for a few users or something more elaborate. FWIW I run growth for a low code platform company and we are one of the retool alternatives. One of the things I am trying to get right is getting the value proposition right for different scenarios like say building a customer portal (unlimited external users) to admin tools (few internal u…

It’s a progression. It starts out as an admin dashboard for a team of 5, then it grows to an internal platform for 15 devs plus “ops” people etc. Thus there’s micro segments inside this market based on stage

Re: Form to DB

#88

Post by lupire »

sodapopcan wrote: post #84
throwaway60320 wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Of course you have to validate on the server. That's a given, always. But you want to provide better UX to the user. Htmx is not simpler than React. I can't deploy that without a server that knows everything about the frontend. React allows me to decouple. Templates are hell. I lived in it for many years, never again.

Detractors of the "html over the wire" movement are always talking about it as if the people working on this stuff didn't live through the jQuery days and are blindly repeating them.

What's wrong with jQuery? All my homies (favorite websites) are jQuery.

Re: Form to DB

#89

Post by prakashn27 »

account-5 wrote: post #36

These types of projects always remind me of MS Access. Access is forms on a database, and really easy to use. It obviously has its drawbacks but nothing has come close to it. I've never understood why MS didn't capitalise on it by extending and improving it.

I miss acccess too. Good old days

Re: Form to DB

#90

Post by prakashn27 »

_heimdall wrote: post #79

How new is this Retool product? The idea that OpenAI, Amazon, NBC, Mercedes, and Doordash all use it seems dubious.

Retool is popular for building internal dashboards on top of you data. It has been there for many years
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